34 ":... :: ";':.. , ..-: : . ; .ø' >. 'iif" " . t f ,..p :., ..:} _ -:. i" .t.:- ., %I : ' 1. ,, , . ; :; :",:,' ": '. ?: :^ , : Vt\, .; ,,<w: A ' ':' . . .:;'.' .......-.-. , {;\r' , '), " :..-:.::. .....:- ^/{::: .(\. J:: Æ.: '.' ";.-'. :t.\': : .f 1 , ::::::;:_;:;:: .,,:-.-..-=====> I 4}. ........ .h_: :t: .....:--., I .TIS sensibly said that what a man smokes is often an index to his sense of discrimination and confidence in himself. Notice the self"assurance among men who smoke Webster cigars. W ebsters not only satisfy the smoker accustomed to the finest of imported Cuban cigars, but favorably impress those in whose presence they are smoked. Yet Websters sell at a price that even a young man starting a career can afford. The slim Golden Wedding Webster is particularly a Hyoung man.s.. cigar. Try it. At New Haven.s Taft, Bos.. ton.s Copley..Plaza, Princeton. s Princeton Inn - and leading hotels, clubs and stores from coast to coast. WEBSTER CIGAR COMPANY 18 7 Madison Ave., New York City , '; . :::.:, '" , .. ,':-; :f ; . '" "." .....:..:::-. I -.". ::::: '::=" " ' '" ''', ", . ;..h-:. . __. . "<<>;;,.,'.. jr .i '" I:' , , ,-./ , :, , ;;,' I,:J: " ./ ,", -", :,, , "' &&:->>':;<'" ",? , , ""':"", :!t: ':.' , ,..,>i r / / .::;;:." :; :-: ':{:g '1. Ai i.1 'vt H1 tw THE AR. T GALLER.IE5 Pierre-Auguste Renoir . I · t'.' J'" , t:/-:" T HE Renoir exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum was fitly prefaced this spring by the Manet show at Wildenstein and the quite rav- ishing Degas show at Durand-Rue!. It is the last big show of the season, and fortunately for lovers of Renoir-per- haps I should say fortunately for all lovers-it will remain on through the summer. Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in 1841 at Li- moges. This makes him a close contemporary of Rodin and Claude Monet, and a little younger than Manet and Degas, who were born in the early eighteen-thirties. His birthplace, where the famous enamels were made in the Middle Ages, is the great pottery centre, and in 1854 he went to work as a china-painter in a porcelain factory. By honest origin, then, Renoir was one of those crea- tures who are so often talked about nowadays-a proletarian painter; and I think he disposes of the patronizing middle-class superstition that a prole- tarian painter would naturally spend all his life depicting the grandeurs and miseries of proletarians. Not merely did Renoir originally have to seek a living as a factory work- er; he lost his job because the fashion- able machine processes that were being introduced in the fifties did away tem- porarily with the need for china-paint- ers - an early victim of technologi- cal unemployment. At seventeen, he entered the studio of Gleyre, where he met Monet and Sisley. So Renoir rOSe into the new aristocracy of the un- employed-the painters and sculptors who were in revolt against the tastes and standards of the bourgeoisie; peo- ple who created art, as the aristocracy flirted and danced and went to the hunt, because it was, despite the meagreness of the artists' subsistence, a profoundly satisfactory mode of life. Renoir's first salon picture was shown in 1863, but he destroyed a good part of his early work, and the present show opens with a portrait of Mme. Darras, done in 1871-a grave piece, carefully modelled, in beautiful repose, the work of a man who was already well within sight of maturity. Mean- while the Franco-Prussian War had taken place, followed by the tense, ex- alted period of the Commune and the savage horror of its suppression. French- . k&t men w re humiliated by the disasters that had overtaken them, but not ex- hausted, and a gathering and tighten- ing of energies took place among the élite.. One marks that sombre intensity in much of Renoir's early work. It achieved its fullest expression toward the end of the seventies; note "La Fillette Attentive," "Two Little Circus Girls," "L'In- génue," and "La Petite Mar- got Bérard." Even in his early maturity Renoir was perhaps more open to the influences around him than any of his peers. He made sortIes now in one direction, now in another. "Le Pont Neuf à Paris," one of the new sunlight pain tings of the Impressionists, was done as early as 1872. Many of these pictures, even as late as "The Duck Pond," are executed with the fine poin tillist stroke of Monet. On the other hand, in "Child with a Hoop," of about 1875, the lace of the collar is put on with a heavy touch that his friend Cézanne applied to his early pictures; only a certain tenderness of contour in the child's face marks it as especially R ., en OIr s. Through this early period, Renoir's palette was as undecided as his tech- nique. Those who think of Renoir chiefly in terms of those streams of scar- let and carmine that issue out of Rubens and Fragonard and suffuse so many of the paintings of Renoir's old age must bow to the cooler charms of the olive greens and dull oranges and gray blues of Renoir's "Melon and a Vase of Roses," painted in the middle seventies. Some of Renoir's greatest paintings, in- deed, are built out of these cool colors and sombre tones. One of the most marvellous of these is the full-length portrait of Mlle. Durand-Ruel, now in the Barnes Foundation Collection and not in the present show, but No. 19 and No. 23 are close runners-up to that pic- ture. There was a moment, marked by "La Pensée," when Renoir's delicacy of touch created forms that were almost emanations, rather than solid bodies, figures that remind one of the femin- ine wraiths that our own George Fuller evoked during the same period. Yet Renoir's diaphanous girls are composed with an underlying firmness that saves them from dissolution, and even in his most ethereal moments ,he never lost touch with solid earth. For during this